There’s a name for it now in American film and literature, the Black equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: It’s the Magical Negro, the Black character who exists exclusively to make whites feel good about themselves. You see the character in so many movies or books about Blacks made by whites, for whites, to celebrate the virtues and greatness of whiteness, as with “Mississippi Burning,” “Green Book,” “The Legend of Bagger Vance” and of course Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
We now have the Magical Negro elevated to an entire curriculum. It’s Florida’s African American History standards. The state Board of Education approved them this week, along with standards for 10 other disciplines. Suddenly combusting ulcers kept me from getting past the African-American ones. You can hardly do better as Exhibit A in a graduate course on critical race theory, vindicating the late Derrick Bell enough to have a chair endowed for him at New College. We’re a sick puppy of a society, or at least a state: let’s not blame America for Florida Man, here in full.
The standards are an excellent illustration of what American history looks like through white eyes, and how whites are the best thing that ever happened to Black people, who apparently should worship the Middle Passage down the chains of their ancestry.
As history of course, the standards are a cracker festival of fantasy and chest-thumping. The history is often inaccurate, when it’s not obscene. But this is what we’ve come to in Florida’s Second Coming of Jim Crow, where Black Codes have been colorized into voting restrictions as elegies to integrity, where the poll tax has returned to hound ex-cons despite a constitutional amendment that supposedly restored their civil rights, where book bans and the overt prohibition on frank discussions of racism in schools and universities pose as academic something in Free Florida. Now we have racism codified in history standards.
The headlines have rightly focused on one obscenity in particular: the suggestion that if it weren’t for slavery, Blacks wouldn’t have learned all those terrific skills like “painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service.” I’m not making this up. In what the standards call a “benchmark clarification,” they specify that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” I’m sure enslaved persons could slip in a little bit of personal time between the slave auctions, the 16 hours in the fields, the whippings, the rapes, the extra-judicial murders.
Necessary but rare nods to atrocities aside, these standards are framed in their totality as one big success story that highlights all the great things whites did for Blacks. They never mention white supremacy or its damning association with Christianity, in effect excusing it by omission. Instead, the standards resort to a form of cynical relativism that makes American slavery nothing more ordinary than the slave systems that existed in Africa or in Muslim slave markets. This is the stuff of Internet revisionism by white nationalists elevated to academic standards.
Some examples drawn directly from the standards:
- “Examine the Underground Railroad and how former slaves partnered with other free people and groups in assisting those escaping from slavery.” Translation: look what whites people did for you.
- “Identify Afro-Eurasian trade routes and methods prior to the development of the Atlantic slave trade.” Translation: Don’t blame whites, everyone else did it.
- “Instruction includes how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.” Translation: See above.
- “Describe the contact of European explorers with systematic slave trading in Africa.” Translation: Blame it on Africans.
- “Instruction includes the similarities and differences between serfdom and slavery.” Translation: Aren’t you lucky you were in the Hammock instead of Siberia?
- Instruction includes the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries. Translation: Fucking Arabs.
- “Examine the experiences and contributions of African Americans in early Florida.” Translation: Live, shop, play!
- “Instruction includes the Society of Friends (Quakers) and their efforts to end slavery throughout the United States.” Translation: Don’t blame Christians.
- “Instruction includes what made indentured servitude contracts a risky investment for colonists, based on economic and social factors.” Translation: Slavery was risk-free.
- “Instruction includes the transition from an indentured to a slave-based economy.” Translation: Capitalism at its finest.
The standards require instruction on writings by “Africans living in the United States,” as if Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were aliens as opposed to Americans denied their rights. It refers to race massacres such as Ocoee and Rosewood in Florida as violence “perpetrated against and by African Americans,” again creating the false equivalence that echoes to this day in blaming the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a wonder the standards don’t portray Sally Hemings as a seductress doing her part for the birthing of Thomas Jefferson’s social conscience.
In these standards, slavery is taught exclusively as a neutral, economic system made necessary by the “desire for knowledge of land cultivation”–again, I’m not making this up– “and the rise in the production of tobacco and rice,” as opposed to how, say, “New Orleans became the Walmart of people selling” (in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s words), so a white aristocracy could croon about freedom and honor, and croon still about Southern gallantry.
But hey, the standards will “Examine economic developments of and for African Americans post-WWI, including the spending power and the development of black businesses and innovations” and “includes the impact of Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company,” because who really needs to read about the more than four thousand Black men, women and children murdered by lynching from the end of Reconstruction to 1950? We’ll learn about “the ramifications of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933-1945) on African Americans,” but not his refusal to sign an anti-lynching law. We’ll learn about “the effects of the election of African Americans to national office” but let’s not trouble with the kicking of Adam Clayton Powell out of Congress or the robbing of Muhammad Ali of his title.
There’s a sprinkling of the grimness of our racist past in the standards to be sure, but it has the feel of tokenism, a sort of reverse use of the Magical Negro to check off a few boxes and come out looking like the standards valiantly address the nation’s tragic failure. But that’s just it: the standards don’t see tragedy. They don’t see failure. They see a linear narrative that goes from few peculiar mistakes here and there to great triumph. No need to dwell on the grim. No need, really, to dwell on the past. These history standards have very little to do with history and very much to do with a recasting of myths as reality.
An entire system based on terrorism and repression is magically transformed into a sensitive evolution of a white supremacist culture that did so much to allow Blacks to find themselves and their tormentors to pat themselves on the back. Naturally, racism is over. Naturally, Free Florida is God’s gift to Blacks. This is history in the land of DeSantistan. Praise be, massa.
Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
Richard W. Lewis, Jr. says
Thanks Pierre for another excellent, outstanding article. Both of my parents were teachers in Michigan, my mom a fifth grade teacher, and my father a high school Special Education teacher. I can guarantee that both would either quit or go to jail if they were instructed to do what this moronic legislation does, let alone anything else that dip__it Desantis and his cronies have come up with.
Ellen Kincaid says
Even if the truth hurts, it’s still the truth.
Thank you, Pierre Tristam
JEK says
DeSatan needs to go away permanently. What a disgrace this is to teach our kids. Florida wake up please!
Deborah Coffey says
Why do all the White people on here keep “kicking white people down?” And, we’re stupid, too, because we have “no idea of the “Real history of slavery?” FYI, I’ll put my Masters degrees up against yours any time….
Justbob says
And the slave owners would surely help with the fine tuning of a slave’s resume highlighting all the skill sets gained from their experience as an inhuman piece of property.
Stephen says
Lets hit them where it hurts. If they want to make up Black history. I want to stop paying school taxes. Lets just have home schooling. Who will print made up history?
DMFinFlorida says
@ Deborah Coffey …….. BRB – grabbing my popcorn and cheering you on.
Jackson1955 says
Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Yet, some students are only just learning this today. This is partly because, after the war ended, some white southerners started organizations dedicated to promoting textbooks that taught that the war wasn’t about slavery, but rather about “states’ rights.” These false narratives continue to affect the way students are being taught Civil War history today.
I’m about sick of this. This overt, indignant attitude that Americans should just allow Republicans and their selective memory cohorts to steam roll anyone teaching about the REALNESS of slavery is just a fallacy. Heck yes, people should know about it. It’s part of this country’s dirty history. So funny they want people to whitewash slavery from history, but are quick to tell Black people “to go back to where they came from” the minute they feel a Black person has “stepped out of line”, by having the “nerve” to express disdain with racism in this country. You can’t have it both ways. And last time I checked, the only kind of people that wanted to avoid history are the ones who wish to repeat it. Not too long ago that last sentence would have been bizarre to make, but given the boldness of the so-called right, it’s become something crossing many minds considering the rate at which they are turning back the clock. And frankly, it sickens me.
Michael Cocchiola says
Florida is a racist state. The state’s overwhelming majority voted for DeSantis knowing who and what he is. And they liked all of it.
Some will deny this. Some will throw insults back. But, you really are what you stand up and cheer for. And Florida Republicans stand up and cheer for their racist governor.
Nancy N. says
Desantis has just implemented a plan in the state that now allows every parent to homeschool or send their child to private school at state expense. We’ve been using the pilot version of the program, which was limited to special needs students, for years for our daughter. I’m now extra grateful to have that program as it means I can continue to educate my daughter with real history, outside the reach of the Desanistan whitewashed standards.
Nancy N says
We should not excuse those who aren’t standing up and cheering, either, but who turn a blind eye to what is going on and vote Republican for what they claim are other reasons: finances, abortion, etc. Complacency is complicity. If you still give your support to the party while claiming to abhor things it supports, you are just as guilty.
Sherry says
@fyi. . . YA DA YA DA YA DA. . . Most educated/ well traveled people absolutely understand that horrific “slavery” in many different Asian countries still exists today, that not all slaves had/have black skin . . . AND, that African tribes enslave the members of other tribes.
“You” can say whatever you like to try and “spin” the terrible inhumane actions: rape/murder/torture/physical and mental punishment/imprisonment/hard labor/taking of property/destruction of culture/denial of human rights, etc. etc. etc.
BUT, simply because humans’ atrocious inhumanity was, and still is, all too common does NOT make it the least bit acceptable. . . on ANY level!!!
Sherry says
@ Deborah. . . You Go Girl! We are obviously dealing with a DeSantis loving cult member who is absolutely no match for you. . . LOL! Pass that popcorn, will ya DMF?
Truth says
And it was ok for your people to sell your people…that gets deflected every time. Lets blame slavery from 400 years ago for your failures today. Lets have a population of people who have NEVER owned a slave pay us (who was never a slave) because you all cant get yourselves out of the ghetto. Take some responsibility as a race and maybe others will follow suit. As far as BLM…you’re happy with the money they basically stolen for their own personal gain ?
Laurel says
Justbob: But, but, but… you see black people enslaved black people in this country too. Got it? Not to mention black Africans sold people of other tribes into the slavery trade. People are not guilty or innocent by color.
Ed says
I don’t think a majority of white people are racist. I have read multiple articles that both align with Pierre and dispute his view of the curriculum. However, if he is more correct in his opinion than wrong we should all contact our legislators to correct the problem. I have hand written 3 letters expressing concern. Did you?
Most commentators posting her probably lived through the race riots of the 60’s. I trust we all hope it is history not to repeated. But the decisiveness of EVERYTHING is dangerous and I personally feel the use of “magical Negro” trope was overboard.
Just take a step back, process the informations/posts, maybe do a little more research before piously condemning anyone who doesn’t think like you do. I’m pretty sure every Republican is not racist, is not bigoted, is not a Nazi or anything else but a human. There must be a few good ones.
Laurel says
b: No, if we’re gonna tell it like it is, or was, then let’s do it. DeSantis, and his sad minions, are re-writing history for convenience sake. That’s down right fascism. What you and I don’t like here is making us current folks the bad guy with no exception.
All my life I stuck up for people unfairly treated, and was often called names because of it. Innocent people were brutally treated and hung. They were separated from the possibility of the American dream. I didn’t do it. I would fight against it. I don’t support it. I want fairness for us all.
DeSantis is a dangerous man, and he needs to be voted out. We don’t need anymore division, we need to meld together no matter the color, no matter the history. If we’re going to tell history, we need to tell it with all its glory and all its horrid faults. DeSantis and his followers want what they believe is good for them only. It will not work.
Laurel says
Bill C: Thank you. The Africans brought America many skills, foods, song, stories and art. They brought cleverness of need. Anyone in South Carolina knows of sweetgrass bowls, marvelous works of art made from local sweetgrass and pine needles. Beautiful clothing made from indigo dyed cloth.
Humans are capable of horrible things and beautiful things. We are, indeed, a strange animal.
Pierre Tristam says
“Truth” may not have owned human beings but speaks the language of the slave-owner, and worse, aches with nostalgia for the days when he/she/it could demean other human beings, as he/she/it attempts to do here, with mediocre disingenuousness. Must be a member of DeSantis’s academic advisory sty.
Tony Mack says
I recently saw the movie “Amistad.” I don’t think those captured Africans were thinking they would become blacksmiths or anything else as they were be tossed into the holds of those sailing ships. No way were they thinking they were being handed a golden opportunity as their families were being ripped apart, their relatives and neighbors slaughtered and their lives shattered. Now if DeSantis thinks this was okay, I’d invite him and his family to suffer the predation and humiliation those “slaves” suffered on their way to finding meaningful employment in America. He and his ilk would have been right at home in Germany in the Thirties and the mass extermination of the Jews: “Well, we did offer them a free train ride to the country, so what’s the problem?”
Sherry says
@b. . . Wow! I’m surprised you turned off FOX long enough to read this article. If you paid actual attention, you would know that the author of this excellent article is the editor, publisher and owner of “Award Winning” Flaglerlive.
OK. . . you can take your “disgusted” self and follow the mindless lemmings back into FOX cult land now.
Robert Joseph Fortier says
Sorry Pierre, but you are so biased and ridiculous that you actually have to bring the Governor into the article. I am sure you are a nice guy, but you need to stop trying to make a buck by attacking other Americans, who may have a very different view of things than you. You might consider moving to a muslim country…but I doubt you would be very happy there as well, as you would not be able to print. you crap there. America allows you to talk you garbage without punishment.
Sherry says
@local. . . Really? If your claim to fame is shopping in Target and getting out of their parking lot, you really do live a tiny life. How pathetic and sad for you!
Instead of showing your own insecurity, and lack of education, by lamely trying trying to put down those who have worked hard to get advanced degrees, why don’t “you” explain that “truth” you dug up from “credible”, peer reviewed sources. Thanks!
Sherry says
@ Pierre. . . a truly insightful retort. Thanks!
Bill C says
“Carolina- the extra long grain rice”. Remember the advertising jingle? Genetic evidence suggests that the rice grown in the south was introduced here by enslaved Africans who brought the grains with them. Africa has an indigenous rice, Oryza glaberrima, which may have been domesticated about 1500 B.C.E. along the upper Niger River. It spread to west Africa, and when the first Portuguese explorers reached Guinea in 1446, they found extensive fields. Perhaps Carolina Gold descended from this plant.
Nancy N. says
A few good Republicans? I suppose you think there were a few good Nazis too? Anyone who continues to support the party while all of these things are going on is condoning this behavior, not denouncing it. Silence is complicity. And as for “writing our legislators”, that just made me laugh out loud. They are nothing but DeSantis’s lap dogs…and he’s the one who ordered these curriculum changes in the first place. They are too busy congratulating him on the new standards to read your letter condemning them.
Ray W. says
Hello Laurel,
Thank you for your comment.
In it’s August 2019 issue, The Atlantic published an article authored by Drew Gilpin Faust, titled: CARRY ME BACK.
Ms. Faust tells of returning to her childhood region for a funeral service, with a visit to the family cemetery. She looks for and finds a plaque placed in 1957 in the cemetery by a beloved grandmother that reads:
TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE MANY PERSONAL SERVANTS BURIED HERE BEFORE 1865. FAITHFUL AND DEVOTED IN LIFE, THEIR FRIENDS AND MASTERS LAID THEM NEAR THEM IN DEATH WITH AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE THEIR MEMORY REMAINS, THOUGH THEIR WOODEN MARKERS LIKE THE WAY OF LIFE OF THE DAY, ARE GONE FOREVER.
Ms. Faust casts her grandmother’s choice of language style as representative of the “moonlight and magnolias” southern filter that glorified the pre-civil war era, one that romanticizes the plantation culture, but also erases the brutalities of slavery. Slaves are “servants”, she observes from the plaque, and “faithful and devoted.” Slaves are not described on the plaque as “subjugated.” Masters are described as affectionate and grateful, instead of as cruel and physically brutal, as stealing lives and as buying and selling human beings.
Ms. Faust places the visit to the cemetery as just around the time Virginia’s governor, Robert Northam, had been revealed as having attended a party in his youth while in medical school wearing blackface. To Ms. Faust, 1957 saw her as a 10-year-old, just three years after Brown v. Board of Education. 1957 was the year nine children integrated Little Rock’s Central High School.
In 1957, writes Ms. Faust, Virginia, like the nation at large, struggled to deal with a Supreme Court opinion that upended a century of denial.
While the article widely addresses and confronts many issues of slavery and mastery, Ms. Faust closes with the following:
“In its long pursuit of a more genteel white supremacy – a unique Virginia Way of oppression – the state has nurtured the denial, the failure to see, that Ralph Northam represents. The story of Virginia compels us to recognize how important it is that we open our eyes and actively resist the assumptions and traditions that would obscure our vision. To imagine we are or can be color-blind is to render ourselves history-blind – to ignore realities that have defined us for good or for ill. The Founders embraced both slavery and freedom. We have inherited the legacy, and the cost, of both.
“Bryan Stevenson frequently remarks that we are all more than the worst thing we have done. Perhaps Ralph Northam is still in office because enough Virginians share that view. Perhaps somehow we as a nation can acknowledge our worst things and finally overcome them. ‘The past will remain horrible,’ James Baldwin wrote, ‘for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.’ And it will poison the present as well.”
Ray W. says
This exchange just might prove the need to understand two of the many different ways reason can be employed in presenting an argument.
In one method, a person permits reason to lead the search for the best possible choice among multiple choices, some good, some bad. In this method, a good argument must always give way to a better argument.
In the other method, a person forcefully contorts reason to support an argument, without regard to the accuracy or quality of the argument. Whether the argument is good or bad is irrelevant. The goal is to contort reason to support the argument.
Bill C. says
Your comment is shallow and juvenile. The discussion is about slavery, America, and the effects on this society. Having not owned slaves did not exempt you and your ancestors from enjoying the progress of this land and this system. A system that became economically viable in large part because of the slave trade. When the mills in the North were humming and the Southern producers were reaping rewards from the land, the nation grew, became strong and everyone prospered; well at least everyone white did. Whether your ancestors came by ship or were born here they had a leg up on the non-people who worked the land and the indigenous people who were being stripped of their land. So, on the shoulders of your kin you stand. Your position in America today is more by chance than by choice and when you ask that others take responsibility as a race why are you not looking in the mirror and recognizing that you and yours need to do the same?
Bill C. says
This smacks of the story about the Native Americans helping the pilgrims with growing foodstuff during the first hard winter. Looking to justify, soften or in someway balance the atrocity of slavery as it stood in America is indeed indecent dialogue and you should be ashamed of yourself for your comment.
Tired of it says
Your response is ridiculous. You obviously have a problem dealing with the truth. Trying to excuse slavery by any means is disgusting.
Edith Campins says
So by your reasoning slavery is ok because black people sold black people too? The failures of today, are rooted in what white people have done to black Americans for decades. Segregation, denying blacks access to education, denying blacks job opportunities, denying them access to decent housing and on and on. In essence keeping black Americans in the ghetto. How dare you blame blacks for their injustices done to them by people like you! That is the “Truth”.
DoubleGator says
https://www.history.com/news/whipped-peter-slavery-photo-scourged-back-real-story-civil-war
Anthony says
DeSatan as you call him, which fits him. His statement last week about slaves is outragous and once again he is showing our country he is not qualified to be in the White House let alone governor of any state in this country. It’s good the truth about him is finally coming out.
Pierre Tristam says
Willy Boy, if you’re comparing slave-holding societies, you’d be inaccurate to claim the American system was “better” than “3rd World environs.” It was the opposite. America was Number 1 even then in cruelty and debasement, its only rival being the Catholic Church’s treatment of human beings in the Caribbean and Latin America (where, by death rates, cruelty was often harsher).
Pierre Tristam says
Again, thank you for the “allowance,” massa.
Ed says
Thanks for making my point. At least you didn’t call me a Nazi directly.
Sherry says
@rjf. . . Instead of merely sitting back and posting fear and hate filled pop shots against the editor of Flaglerlive, why not work 50 hours a week for many, many years to create your own “Award Winning” credible, fact based media outlet? Or, you can climb back under that slimy rock with the rest of the mindless maga cult.
Laurel says
Ray W.: I’m a tad perplexed why you wrote that to me, unless it is to show that, right or wrong, legacy follows us all.
When I was in the first or second grade, some kid told me my dad (of German decent) was a “nigger.” Apparently, I went home and repeated that in a not so positive way.
We had a woman who would come in a couple times a week to do housework. Now my mother and grandmother were workers (my husband calls me “Norwegian” whenever I overdo it) so I was accustomed to everyone doing equal work at home. After the comment about my dad, my mom set up a visit to this woman’s home with a lesson for me in mind. We visited this woman’s (sorry I don’t remember her name) home, which was spotless, cozy and charming. In her little girl’s room (she had her own room!), across the bed, was laid was a beautiful, pink, Easter Sunday dress, and with it a matching parasol! Imagine, a lacy, pink parasol! I was so impressed.
I learned at that moment, that all people have the capacity to be the best they can be, and that color is not what divides us, ignorance is. This woman was clearly our equal, and the kid who called my father a negative name to me, was the one who was divisive and had a mean spirit.
Laurel says
Robert JF: Uh, that was really uncalled for. We should be able to *speak* (write) our minds, which we are allowed to do here, without someone suggesting we move out of our country.
Nah, uncalled for.
Laurel says
Geode: I don’t know your ancestor’s histories, but there were, indeed, black owners of black slaves here in the U.S..
Your comment about “Pasty White Liberals” makes you sound not so different from those you claim did your ancestors wrong. Many of those PWLs have varying percentages of African DNA.
It’s time we let up on each other, and vote the DeSantis style politicians out together.
Laurel says
Edith: I just can’t let all this slide. Most of what you stated is true BUT there are plenty of blacks who have risen above it all. To name a few, how about Barack Obama as President of the United States and Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, and General Colin Powell for starters? There are many, many more. Yes they experienced suppression and bigotry, but it did not keep them down.
That’s the truth, too.
Laurel says
Bill C.: I’m a native Floridian with South Carolina friends and relatives. The absolutely beautiful Brookgreen Gardens we recently visited in S.C. was, unfortunately, a rice plantation that had 500 slaves working it. One of the owners, the wife, was a fabulous artist, whose statues are on display there. What a dichotomy of the awful and the wonderful! We need to know both the good and bad of our history.
Laurel says
I believe the vast majority of Americans are not going to let this happen. I also believe most of Floridians did not realize that the second term of DeSantis was ever going to be this crazy. He really showed his true colors this second, ridiculous time around.
Bill C. says
Mommy come quick…Look, look its the black Republican who, through pseudo-intellectualism and personal success chooses to hold his personal experience as the benchmark by which an entire race of people needs to ignore the one-sidedness of America and pay attention to his interpretation of “blame the Government”. A chronological review of history and in what order things beget other things might better help you understand why your comment is misguided. Sounds like you’ve fiddled too much already, stick with the popcorn.
Bill C says
No, my intention was the opposite of your rush-to-judgement conclusion. The history is that a major part of the colonial economy was invented by the enslaved Africans, not by the planters who took advantage of their knowledge, then enriched themselves through their slave labor. The rice culture exists to this day.
Laurel says
Ray W.: Okay, on second read, it sounds like white washing history is repeating itself!
Ray W. says
You commented about the need to tell history with all its flaws. I was reminded of Ms. Faust’s comments, as she recounted her wonder about why her grandmother would word the plaque the way she did. And, yes, glorifying a sordid historical episode is repeating itself. Thank you for your comments, and not just these comments.
Laurel says
Ray W.: I am complimented! :)